A hero stands up to government lies

The past week was extraordinary in the annals of official U.S. government deception, and not just because President Trump admitted fabricating the falsehood that this nation has a trade deficit with Canada, further undermining this nation’s credibility and relationship with a neighbor and ally.

There is nothing new or surprising about the president or his top aides shading or inventing reality. The Washington Post, which is keeping track, has counted more than 2,100 false or misleading statements in his first year.

The surprise of the week is that two patriotic public servants were willing to risk their livelihoods to insist on telling the truth. Perhaps it is not shocking that each is now unemployed.

In San Francisco, James Schwab, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, decided that he could no longer “bear the burden” of advancing the falsehood that more than 864 criminals managed to elude capture because of Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s warning that an immigration raid was coming. “I told them that the information was wrong, they asked me to deflect, and I didn’t agree with that,” he told The Chronicle. “Then I took some time and I quit.”

Truth prevailed, but at a cost to Schwab’s career.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Steve Goldstein issued a statement that Secretary Rex Tillerson was “unaware of the reason” for his firing and had not heard directly from the president before Trump made the announcement on Twitter. “I spoke for the secretary of state,” Goldstein said, which, after all, was his job. He was promptly fired for contradicting the blurred-focus White House version of events.

So there you have it in the Trump era: Lie or quit. Tell the truth, and you’re fired.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders deflects and deceives on almost a daily basis, but that’s the pact she has made with the devil — and her credibility is near zero. Her predecessor, Sean Spicer, immolated his integrity on Day One, when he accepted marching orders to support Trump’s provably false claim that his inauguration crowd exceeded President Barack Obama’s.

So what does it mean, and does it matter, that this administration has such reckless disregard for the truth?

I could think of no better perspective to tap than that of Leon Panetta, who has devoted his life’s work to ethical public service and whose resume is second to none: CIA director, secretary of defense, director of the Office of Management and Budget, longtime member of Congress, White House chief of staff.

“I’ve always felt that in a democracy governing is based on trust, and trust is based on telling the truth,” Panetta said last week. “When you don’t tell the truth, it’s undermining the trust that is basic to our democracy.”

Trump is not the first president to struggle with truth. President Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam come to mind, as does President Richard Nixon and Watergate, and President Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

But make no mistake: the scale and frequency — and toxicity — of the Trump propaganda campaign is unprecedented, and last week’s events suggest it is extending well beyond the president’s protective inner circle.

“The inability to tell the truth and to lie: I’ve never seen it as pervasive as it is in this administration,” Panetta said. “I think that impacts all the way down the line to the spokesmen who are basically told to lie if you have to in order to make sure the best image of that agency or department is presented to the public.”

I reached out to two veteran political spokespeople, a Republican (Rob Stutzman of Sacramento) and a Democrat (Nathan Ballard of San Francisco) to get their takes on the state of disinformation. Each is skilled in identifying and disseminating the most favorable facts for a client. Each found the predicament facing Schwab to be both highly unusual and highly disturbing.

“It really is extraordinary,” Stutzman said. “The job of a law enforcement spokesman — and I’ve been in that role at the (state) Department of Justice — is not to color facts, just to communicate clear and correct and concise information.”

Stutzman, who now runs his own public affairs firm, said that Rule One for his new hires is to tell the truth. He and Ballard made the same point: Their rationale is based on ethics and practicality. Once that trust with a journalist is lost, it is never regained, they asserted.

“If you can’t tell the truth about crowd size, then how can you trust anything else (from the White House) to be the truth?” Stutzman said.

Ballard said there is “nothing wrong with picking your strongest facts and making an argument —that’s a practice as old as Jefferson and Hamilton.” A free press, he added, affords the other side to make its best points.

“You’re always telling a version of the facts that may not be 100 percent complete,” Ballard said. “But omitting facts is materially different than inventing facts. It’s always important to me to treat every encounter with a journalist as if you’re under oath.”

Schwab quit as ICE spokesman because “I didn’t want to perpetuate misleading facts” that were made locally and amplified at the top by the president and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Schwab is a hero in an era when too few are willing to speak truth to power, but he may not be unemployed for long. Ballard jumped on Twitter to offer him a job.

This nation desperately needs more truth tellers in an administration that is showing no appreciation for the institutions or values that are at the core of an informed and engaged democracy.

“There’s no doubt in my mind,” Panetta said, “that history is going to identify this president as one who has failed in almost every instance to tell the truth to the American people.”

Sadly, outrageously, a culture built on what White House counselor Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts” is oozing downstream through our government.

Before joining the opinion pages, he directed the newspaper’s East Bay news coverage. He started at The Chronicle in 1990 as an assistant city editor.

John began his journalism career as a reporter for the Red Bluff Daily News. Two years later, he was promoted to the Washington, D.C., bureau of the newspaper’s parent company, Donrey Media Group. After that, he worked as a general assignment reporter for the Associated Press in Philadelphia and as a statehouse reporter and assistant city editor for the Denver Post.

He graduated from Humboldt State University in 1977 with a degree in journalism. He received a Distinguished Alumni Award from HSU in 2009 and was the university’s commencement speaker in 2010.